This former American Eagle social media manager thinks the Sydney Sweeney campaign is a miss

On August 1, after its “Sydney Sweeney Has Great Jeans” campaign became a culture-war battle over what critics saw as evoking eugenics and oversexualizing a back-to-school campaign, American Eagle issued a statement on Instagram.

The statement asserted that the campaign “was always about the jeans” and, while not apologizing, sounded a note of inclusivity.

“We’ll continue to celebrate how everyone wears their AE jeans with confidence, their way,” the statement concluded. “Great jeans look good on everyone.”

Among those following how the brand would respond to the controversy on social media, it turns out, was someone who once ran American Eagle’s social media channels: Hailey Knott. She worked for the retailer from 2022 to 2024, and she’s now social media marketing manager at the Gemological Institute of America.

In a TikTok video, Knott said she was “disappointed, but not surprised” by what she called the company’s “weak-ass statement.”

In other posts, Knott focussed on the campaign itself rather than American Eagle’s response to critics.

“This is the back-to-school campaign, which also makes all of this over-sexualization disturbing,” Knott said in a TikTok video that had been viewed more than 1.5 million times when this article was published.

“Now all of the internet is finally seeing the lack of direction, lack of social awareness that is the American Eagle marketing leadership team,” she said.

“This brand was desperate for a moment, and I don’t think that this is the one that they were hoping for,” she said.

American Eagle did not respond to a request for comment. Knott did not respond to a message seeking further comment.

Knott noted in a LinkedIn post announcing that she was leaving American Eagle last year that she had begun working as a sales associate at one of the company’s stores in 2014, when she was in college. In her TikTok video, she said working on the sales floor gave her “an extremely good idea of who was buying the clothes” and who “liked the product.”

But as Knott told it on TikTok, when she joined the management team in 2022, she found that senior executives of the company were too distracted by their competitors to focus properly on their core consumers.